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Shutdown, budget bills on floor this week

The next full moon, March 27, is the first deadline for lawmakers. | AP Photos

The White House estimates that the president’s last offer totaled $930 billion not counting interest savings from reducing future borrowing. Using the same standard, Murray’s $975 billion is closer to $731 billion — or about $200 billion less than Obama. Most important, perhaps, her savings from mandatory benefit payments add up to $351 billion — less than half of the $730 billion in the president’s package.

Whether because of Ryan’s ambition or the rightward tilt of his conference, similar pressures work in the opposite direction in the House.

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To a surprising degree, the chairman shies away from short-term Medicare changes. By some estimates, he offers fewer 10-year savings from this account than Obama. Instead Ryan goes after poverty programs full throttle and rearranges the spending targets under the 2011 Budget Control Act to cut nondefense appropriations to $414 billion in 2014, a $55 billion reduction on top of the cuts made in sequestration.

Put in some historic perspective, this rolls back the clock at least 10 years. When adjusted for inflation, Obama would have significantly less in discretionary funds than Bush had in 2004 — when Republicans controlled both houses of Congress.

The second big conflict for the GOP is the budget’s treatment of the working poor.

In the 1990s welfare reform debate, these families were embraced by Republicans as the true heroes of an effort to spur self-reliance. The safety net has since shifted away from the very poor, in fact, and more toward the elderly and these working families in the 100 percent to 130 percent of poverty range.

Both parties face a challenge now in trying to sustain this aid — and defining where to draw the line above poverty. It is a tricky process in tough economic times, and often Ryan’s plan can seem to overreach.

“Part of the whole reboot of the Republican Party has been an effort to say they are concerned about poverty,” said Maryland Rep. Chris Van Hollen, the ranking member on the House budget panel. “It’s Orwellian when they are shredding these same programs.”

Robert Greenstein, executive director of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a Washington-based progressive nonprofit, estimates that about $800 billion in savings would come from one corner of the budget in which 70 percent of the spending is for the needy and disadvantaged. “The figure is alarming,” Greenstein said.

“We don’t help a starving child necessarily by creating policies that keep the starving child’s father or mother out of work,” said Rep. Reid Ribble (R-Wis.) in defending the Ryan plan at the committee markup. But the budget calls for re-imposing an outdated asset test for food stamps that would also make it harder for the father and mother to have a car to get to work.